The hair is scantier and infinitely shorter. But the gravelly voice is still the same, belting out the mixture of Tory aggression and barbed humour in south Yorkshire overtones that, 23 years ago, led Mrs Thatcher to tag a 16-year-old as "possibly another young Pitt".

This is the voice that, with its Churchillian cadences, has often penetrated Tony Blair's Wednesday afternoon platitudes.

If his well-scripted speeches were the only asset being compared, William Hague would be streets ahead of his rival. But, like an aria from the cells in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, it comes through many bars, few of which can be sawn through soon.

Crucially, the pragmatic if rightwing Hague is imprisoned by the fact that he only beat Europhile Kenneth Clarke for the Tory leadership in June 1997 because his party's crushing May 1997 defeat left its MP-electorate three-quarters Europhobic, instead of two-thirds.

These figures have made the agile Hague a tighter prisoner of rightwing anti-Europeans than he would like, and explains why he handcuffed himself to the mechanistic formula of not joining the euro until after the next parliament.

As a former star of the McKinsey management consultancy, he knows better than most Tories that if the euro's slump ends soon, all UK internationally trading big businesses will be dealing in euros long before the Tories would like.

But he has to pretend to be as blinkered as the men by whose votes he was elected, and by whose votes he may remain in office if he loses the next general election.

Although colour-blind, he is not himself a gimlet-eyed zealot. When he became Welsh secretary in 1995 after John Redwood, Hague showed himself much more deft and willing to be assimilated than his predecessor, even to the point of marrying Ffion, the pretty young civil servant who tried to teach him enough Welsh to avoid badmouthing the Welsh anthem.

For his frontbench, he prefers to rely on the saner, more reasonable Eurosceptics, such as Michael Ancram, Michael Trend and, most recently, Michael Portillo. But the prevailing atmosphere of Europhobia has made it impossible for such talents as Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine to join his frontbench.

It has forced two clever ex-ministers, Ian Taylor and David Curry, into internal exile on the backbench. And some MPs, such as Peter Temple-Morris and Shaun Woodward, have fled to the Labour benches, in the latter case because homophobia often joins Europhobia among Tory rightwingers.

Hague's election promises also have to be tailored in line with his rightwing supporters. The Tories' relative success in fighting the euro at the last European elections has meant his recent mini-manifesto is both anti-Brussels and leans heavily on the Bush definition of "compassionate Conservatism", with privatised pensions and universities, as well as forcing single mothers to enter work.

Hague is also constrained by the fact that the Tory party has shrunk from the many-millioned broad-church mass party it once was to a sectarian rightwing group with some 350,000 members, mostly over 60.

After two serious recessions and the forced exit from the exchange rate mechanism, it has lost most of its young and middle-aged members, particularly those with business links, who lost confidence in Tory economic competence.

This shrinkage in membership and business backing has left starved Conservative Central Office at the mercy of a single Tory billionaire, Michael Ashcroft. The £3m he contributed last year was indispensable, even if he still has not moved himself back from Belize, as required for the peerage Hague secured for him.

All these troubles explain why Hague was initially reluctant to inherit the leadership in the wake of May 1997 and considered becoming deputy to Michael Howard. But his early training in adversity, as a young Tory in the overwhelmingly Labour Rother Valley, overcame any doubts.

Despite foolish boasts of downing 14 pints a day in his youth, Hague's background is sedate. He was born in Rotherham in 1961, the son of a family of local soft-drink ("Hague pop") manufacturers.

He went from Wath-on-Dearne Comprehensive to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he chalked up 1st Class Honours in PPE before his MBA with Distinction at France's Insead business school.

He worked for eight years at top management consultants McKinsey, where his biggest job was advising Oxford on fundraising.

This came to an end when he was chosen from among 360 hopefuls for the Yorkshire seat of Richmond, vacated by Leon Brittan. In 1989, he narrowly squeaked into parliament, the last Tory byelection candidate to do so for a decade.

He moved ahead fast, becoming parliamentary private secretary to Norman Lamont a year later - and so having a hand in the introduction of the fuel price escalator which has so troubled Tony Blair.

In 1993, at 32, he became under secretary for social security. A year later he was promoted to minister of state, to restore relations with the disabled after the cock-ups of Nick Scott. John Major wanted to promote him to chief secretary to the treasury, but Chancellor Ken Clarke thought him too rightwing.

As leader, his political postures had been mixed. A strong backer of capital punishment, he has also been one of the minority of Tory MPs to vote to reduce the age of homosexual consent to 16, probably converted by his friend and flatmate, Alan Duncan.

But his most liberal attitude, of thinking hereditary peers "silly", goes back to a little noted Tory conference speech at 19.